A DICE animator, Ryan Duffin, said (via Polygon) that the Dragon's Teeth expansion coming to Battlefield 4 will add a two-handed ballistic shield to player's loadouts.

Initially, the team were hoping to include the ability to equip a ballistic shield in the game and shoot from behind it with a selection of handguns, according to senior animator Ryan Duffin. But after trying a number of approaches, the team realized that the best way to deliver the bullet-stopping piece of equipment to the game was to make it a two-handed, movable piece of cover.

The expansion is said to focus on urban warfare, though not much else is known about the expansion pack. But why make it a two-handed shield instead of giving players a one-handed shield and the ability to fire a pistol with the free hand?

Ultimately, all of the approaches failed because they didn't have enough time to create the needed animation changes or they were hindered by last-gen console memory constraints.

"We didn't have enough memory," Duffin said. "It added about a megabyte, but a megabyte on a 2006 console is a lot, so it didn't work out."

After working through three approaches, the team started looking at the possibility of having a shield that would be wielded with two hands, making it impossible to use a handgun at the same time. While a gun can't be wielded at the same time, players will be able to melee with the shield with an attack range of about one meter.

Duffin said that "stopping bullets in a first-person shooter is a ton of fun" and that they are "confident that it will create a new dynamic for the game."